| | OPINION
How to Rule and Control
by Yitzchok Roth
The Right won in elections, time after time. It controlled the government and had a majority in the Knesset, but it never grasped the art of ruling and control.
It began in the days of Menachem Begin, the man with the Jabotinsky aura who believed he lived in a democracy. Even after he rose to power, he allowed the Left to continue to rule the courts, the media and government offices. In the Leftist camp of those times, it was expected that Begin, the sworn Rightist nationalist, would rule over those power points and it would have been taken in stride, after dozens of years of despotic Leftist rule in those areas.
The High Court was yet before Aharon Barak, and it would probably not have intervened if Begin had instated some order in the Leftist camp in general. But Begin was a democrat, heart and soul, and refused to touch these national symbolic areas, even if it would eventually be his nemesis.
The Right continued governing along this path, but those who really ruled were the Left wingers. Netanyahu could have seized the opportunity to mend these faults, and it was not for naught that Barak actually praised Netanyahu that during all the years of his tenure, Netanyahu preserved the status of the courts.
When the time came that he awoke to the truth that the judicial system was mobilized against him, he would have had plenty of time to have new judges appointed who were more conservative and less leftist, and appoint the top positions in the media with the same. But he continued to drag his feet against the judicial system, and instead, organized his own media thrust, when he could have changed this from inside in his favor and seize control from those bodies subsidized by the government.
And then, the Left came into power and taught the Right an important lesson in democracy: how to rule. The Left controlled the Knesset and its committees, leaving marginal, nominal power to the rest. In the short time that Nisenkorn operated in the Justice Ministry, he succeeded in appointing dozens of judges with his strong-arm policies and today, the Left rules again over the central media outlet, known as Galei Zahal, the army station. Security Minister Ganz, is responsible for the radio stations. These stations are understandably funded by a government budget which threatens to close down channels, is a reflection of the Leftist control over the media, shamelessly, without blinking, without apologetics.
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